Spider-Man General Discussion

And then, in the first issue of Ewing's Captain America and the Mighty Avengers, Peter admits to actually having had a brief Randroid phase in college.

Edited by TrashJack on May 2nd 2024 at 3:32:27 PM

The Rand thing is more people making fun of how Steve Ditko was a hardcore Objectivist and spent most of his career after leaving Marvel churning out Randian propaganda like Mr. A than anything from the actual Lee-Ditko comics. Admittedly, Peter not being a Rand worshipper was probably only because of Stan reining in Steve, given that Ditko only started making the aforementioned propaganda-esque comics when he no longer had collaborators to tell him "dude, quit it".

People like to shit on Lee has being a controlling hack but there is a lot of positives to the guy

"I am Alpharius. This is a lie."

Wonder what was his 'Rand plan there.

You do know that Ditko didn't actually talk politics in the office back in Marvel right? And that it was STAN LEE who introduced him to Ayn Rand.

There's a common idea that Stan Lee reigned in Steve Ditko from turning Spider-Man into an objectivist mouthpiece but that's bull. It's the same energy of "Steve Ditko objected to Norman Osborn being the Green Goblin because Ditko didn't want evil businessmen."

Edited by RedHunter543 on May 3rd 2024 at 12:02:49 AM

I'll teach you a lesson about just how cruel the world can be. That's my job, as an adult.

Handsome Rob has arrived....to make you all sad.

Context: A sad story riffing on both The Little Match Girl and The Kid Who Collects Spider-Man.

Poor kid.

One Strip! One Strip!

Jokes on you, I've actually read that comic, it's in my Brand New Day collection series that contains the Gauntlet.

And the one where I stopped reading Spider-Man for long years because of the shed.

I'll teach you a lesson about just how cruel the world can be. That's my job, as an adult.

The positives coming almost entirely from his own assessment of himself, of course.

I do feel like it came at the cost of a lot of other creatives. There are still people claiming that Stan Lee is solely responsible for a lot of great things in Marvel like most of it's heroes.

Jack Kirby left for a reason. Sure, Stan Lee has a lot of positives but the fact this train of discussion started because of how he supposedly stopped Ditko from injecting objectivism into Spider-Man is just bull.

Like, Steve Ditko gets unfairly treated by certain fans. Sure I'm not exactly fond of his ACTUAL objectivist stuff but shit like "Stan Lee was the one who wanted Norman Osborn to be the Green Goblin because Ditko refused for objectivist reasons and injected ALL the humanist themes in Spider-Man" is where it gets tiring.

Edited by RedHunter543 on May 3rd 2024 at 4:58:51 PM

I'll teach you a lesson about just how cruel the world can be. That's my job, as an adult.

The last is especially funny when the other story is that it was Ditko who wanted it to be Norman - even planted him in the art earlier in the story and hinting at Norman's super strength in the first issue he appears in (he knocks Spidey out with one punch to the back of the head, and Spidey assumes he'd been hit with a large piece of stone debris)

According to a 1966 article in the Web-Spinner fansize, John Romita (who replaced Ditko on ASM) related that it was Ditko's idea to make Norman the GG, and Stan Lee wanted to reveal GG as Ned Leeds - which is hilarious given that Ned was later chosen as one of the identities for Hobgoblin.

There's also the story of Stan Lee originally envisioning Green Goblin as an actual, supernatural goblin with Ditko deciding they should be human to fit Spider-man's mythos better - which would explain where the Goblin imagery even came from originally.

edit: Re-reading Norman's debut issue, yeah, this guy was 100% planned from the start to be Green Goblin. He shoots Stromm from a window that, when Spidey checks, hangs out over a long drop with no platforms of any kind. And Spidey makes a note that there were no ladders, ropes, or sound of a helicopter that could have allowed the gunman to make that shot and disappear so quickly. That's Norman using his glider.

Edited by Saiga on May 3rd 2024 at 3:51:19 AM

Yeah, Ditko even gave an interview stating he 100% intended for Norman to be the Goblin.

So it’s pretty disgusting to me, to see people credit Stan Lee as the brains behind that decision because the rumors were that Ditko was against that idea because of objectivism.

I'll teach you a lesson about just how cruel the world can be. That's my job, as an adult.

Curious who do people think it was supposed to be. If it wasn't Norman.

"That's right mortal. By channeling my divine rage into power, I have forged a new instrument in which to destroy you."

I think I've stated it before, but Stan Lee was more pivotal to Marvel's come back than Steve Ditko and Jack Kirby were, but that was due to his contributions as a salesman. Creatively, his contributions were writing dialog. The Marvel method was the artist telling the story, and Stan Lee screwed that up with Silver Surfer, which he decided to launch without Jack Kirby's input, etc.

Norman Osborn was a typical objectivist villain though. He was a criminal loon, a moocher who abused other people's work and did not deserve his fortune. He got refined into a more legitimately successful businessman and inventor later. Even in the early days he did not oppose an objectivist progatonist, however. What he opposed was a struggling photo journalist orphan who was all the warning signs of a future school shooter, albeit one slowly on the path to something more healthy. Peter seemed to get happier a lot more quickly once Ditko was off the book.

Whatever changed or didn't change with Ditko, objectivism wasn't really it though. Ditko's Spider-Man was inspired by Spider Queen and Blue Demon, after Jack Kirby's Beetle pitch was rejected. It's just that Ditko's later works, Mr. A in particular, stain people's opinions on his earlier ones.

Edited by IndirectActiveTransport on May 3rd 2024 at 8:22:25 AM

I heard the story about Stan wanting Green Goblin to be Ned Leeds too. I think it got shot down because they already did an evil Daily Bugle employee with Big Man not too long ago, and they didn't want a repeat of that.

I think they ended up (very loosely) adapting the concept of a love interest dating/engaged to a secret antagonist somewhat with Felicia's relationship with Jason Macendale during Spider-Man: TAS

And even then, you had Jameson supporting the Spider Slayer, as well as Betty Brant's brother associated with Dr. Octopus, so yeah didn't need a 4th.😅

An important thing to remember about the Lee/Ditko Spider-Man is that, in the latter half of it, the two creators were barely communicating. Ditko would draw up an issue on their own, turn it in, then Lee would add in dialogue, narration, and thought balloons without necessarily knowing what Ditko intended for any given scene, just trying to put in what made sense given the context of the pictures. (And sometimes getting it wrong - when the Master Planner's henchmen first appeared, Lee wrote them as working for that issue's villain, an ordinary burglar called the Cat, unaware they were meant as foreshadowing for next issue's story.)

With that setup, if there was any particular philosophy Ditko wanted to put in the book (Objectivist or otherwise), it's not surprising if it got lost in translation - not from Lee "reigning Ditko in", necessarily, but just from poor communication.

Reading the Venom vs Carnage series that introduced Toxin.

It's a shame reading this and remembering what happens to Patrick and his family later on. What went on with the Toxin character that lead to them offscreening his host?

"I am Alpharius. This is a lie."

Spider-Woman (2023) #7: Do the individual members call themselves "Assemblers?"◊

Remender was apparently just told to "kill all of the other symbiote characters."

It would seem there was some desire to reverse the Uniqueness Decay of symbiotes around the time of the Rick Remender Venom run, which isn't entirely unreasonable considering how most of the symbiotes prior to that run were basically just generic low-rent versions of Venom himself and Carnage (who was himself a low-rent Venom). Plus a lot of them were introduced amid the 90s and early 2000s, the periods for Spider-Man that editorial hates and wants to pretend didn't happen or to actively shit on because they hate that readers like anything not from the 60s and 70s. Anyways, the end result was a mass culling of the symbiotes in the vein of DC trying to emphasize Superman as the one and only Kryptonian Post-Crisis.

Of course, they later went back on this and started introducing symbiote characters again and brought back one or two who'd been dumped prior, making it all rather pointless.

Right editorial bullshit.

Marvel regularly swings between promoting the symbiote brand and culling the auxiliary symbiotes completely at random.

Cullen Bunn had to depower Andi himself because he was worried Marvel would kill her off cause they were in a "no more symbiotes" phase at the time.

"I am Alpharius. This is a lie."

As far as I know Toxin was initially pushed to be a big recurring character, similar to Venom and Carnage. He even got a mini featuring him not long after his debut.

That mini both bombed and was panned, so hard that editorial basically shelved him until years later they reintroduced the symbiote sans host just to attach him to Eddie. We only found out about Patrick's fate in a tweet.

It's almost tragic just how one bad arc ruined an otherwise prospective character.

#IceBearForPresident

It probably didn't help that by the time he was acknowledged again, Flash had become Venom and got a much better reception for a lot of reasons. In a lot of ways, Flash as Agent Venom does come off as kind of an attempt to do Toxin again right.

Edited by immortaleditor on May 3rd 2024 at 4:01:56 AM

I get Patrick being retired, I just take issue with the fact him and his whole family was brutally murdered offscreen.

Thats just mean-spirited.

"I am Alpharius. This is a lie."

I still feel bad they went so far as 'the guy who Venom bonded with one time while looking for Peter'.

The Protomen enhanced my life.